Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Is social media too social?

This week we tackled the ever controversial topic of social media.  Almost everybody, no matter their profession seems to have an opinion on its use in today’s culture.  Obviously, my main focus will be on how social media affects my ability to teach my students.  Unfortunately, regardless of my opinion I can’t use social media in my classroom.  Many of you may be wondering why.  Well, the answer is because of the clientele that I teach.  All of my students are behaviorally challenged, and a majority of them are adjudicated to a local residential facility.  Due to these situations none of my students are able to carry cell phones.  Even with this policy we still have a few issues with cell phone use in class.  Honestly, I am kind of glad that I don’t have to deal with the cell phone issue a lot.  It just seems to be a whole lot more hassle than it’s worth. Especially, with my students.  I would really like to investigate some of the closed sites like: Schoology, Edmodo, and Google Classroom to see if they would allow me a lot of the same freedoms of social media without many of the outside communication concerns.
Finally, we discussed a couple of resource sharing tools: Pinterest and Symbaloo.  Now, to be honest I was so against Pinterest.  I had the idea that it was just for "artsy craftsy" people.  However, I have since softened my opinion of Pinterest and found it to be a potentially valuable resource.
On the other hand, I am very excited about Symbaloo.  Symbaloo is a website organizer.  There are two different sites for Symbaloo, one is designed for educators.  The links that I have here are to the education version.  At first, I found it a little difficult to set up my first collection of websites, but after I used it a while I got the hang of it.  In Symbaloo these collections are called “webmixes”.  Here is my first attempt at a Symbaloo webmix.
 


If you would like to know more about how to use Symbaloo please check out the following video:




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